Scrabble, the History of a Classic Board Game
Who Invented Scrabble, One of the Best Kids Games?
Dec 21, 2008
Back in 1931, an architect called Alfred Butts found himself jobless and with plenty of time on his hands. To alleviate his boredom he set about creating a new form of family entertainment based around his love of words and games.
The Birth of the Family Board Game Scrabble
Butts disliked games based on pure luck such as those involving dice and also games like chess, which required a higher level of genius. He set about devising a game based on a combination of both skill and luck and his first idea was called Lexico, a board-less game where players earned points for creating words from letters chosen at random.
The New York Times and the English Language
From studying the New York Times, Butts spotted that the letter E was the most common and that other letters like Q, X, Z and Y were used far less often. He assigned a points system to the letters giving high value to difficult letters like Z and X and a low value to commonly used consonants like T and C.
To make the game more difficult he restricted the number of times the letter S could be used.
Initial Failure of Scrabble
No games manufacturer was excited by this educational family game and, despite adding a board in 1938 and renaming the new board game several times culminating in Criss-Crosswords in line with the board layout, Butts just could not market his invention.
Then along came James Brunet who, after playing the game, became convinced of its potential. He agreed a royalty with Butts and renamed the game Scrabble, registering the name on December 16th, 1948.
Scrabble Makes Progress
Brunet formed a cottage industry to produce the newly named Scrabble, stamping letters onto wooden tiles. His efforts produced just 2251 games in its first year and he made a loss.
Three years later, despite increasing production by finely tuning the manufacturing process and making Scrabble tiles out of plastic, Brunet and Scrabble were still insolvent until the chairman of Macys in New York played the game on holiday. On asking his toy department to send him up a few sets to give to friends, he was horrified to learn that the department store did not stock the family board game.
A large purchase of Scrabble for the store followed together with a promotional campaign and demand rocketed. Brunet soon had to license Scrabble to a manufacturer who had originally turned the game down. By 1953, Scrabble had made 4 million sales and the rest is history.
Scrabble is a Key Learning Tool for Kids
Today, 150 million sets of Scrabble have been sold worldwide, the game has been translated into 29 different languages and there are several variants of the board game including Travel Scrabble and most recently online Scrabble including a Facebook version of the game called Scrabulous. The game provides both family fun and a learning experience.
Mattel now own worldwide rights to the game except in the US and Canada where Hasbro manages the distribution.
The Inventor of Scrabble
Alfred Butts died in 1993 at the grand age of 93. Whilst others took his idea forward and made it into the institution it is today, Butts died happily having seen millions of families and kids play his Scrabble game all over the world.
Related Articles:
You may be interested in our other scrabble articles such as using high score letters like Q and Z and other tips on winning in Scrabble.
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